Competition Write Ups

On Saturday 11th January, Team GAVIN travelled to Simon Langton Boys Grammar School for an exciting VEX robotics tournament. With all the best teams from the south east (plus two groups all the way from Finland!), tensions were high and once again our robot was a lot smaller (but no less mighty) than the opposition. After blazing our way through the qualifying round despite a few technical difficulties, this little robot proved to be fast and agile at picking up and placing cubes in the towers. As the quarter finals approached, we formed a strong alliance with a team from the Langton but unfortunately this wasn’t quite enough to snatch victory. However, this certainly won’t deter Team GAVIN as we’ll still be working hard this season to secure sponsorship in order to afford new parts and hopefully make a big comeback next year. A huge thank you to Max, Benedict and Alex for being an outstanding pit crew and Toby and Alfie for their coding skills and dedication to our social media pages (gavin.molecular.page and our Instagram: gavin_59394a). Also well done to Jonty for keeping calm under the pressure of driving!

Finally we need to thank our generous sponsors Flexible Lab Solutions and of course our incredibly dedicated teacher, Mr Perks because without his endless enthusiasm and confidence in us we would never have been able to get this far.

Footnote - Thanks to Lara for writing this amazing summary and being brilliant as well.

Recently our Robotics team (GAVIN 59394A) competed in the VEX VRC United Kingdom Nationals. The competition was held at the Telford International Centre. The competition was held over the course of 2 days and was very eventful. During the course of the event we made small adjustments to our robot and had quite a few issues. By the second day we had fixed these issues but it wasn't enough to pull us through and we got knokced out in the first knockout round. But there is still next year! 😊😊😊

Robots, technology and fierce competition- what more could you ask for on a Saturday morning? Well, you must look no further than Vex robots- where stem enthusiasts can design, build and operate their own machine.

We arrived at the competition ridiculously early in the morning- all excited as ever and equipped with lots of snacks to get us through the day. As we walked into the room, the sight was somewhat terrifying- loads of robots all towering over our tiny little claw-bot. But we were definitely very enthusiastic to make up for this. The competition started off with many qualifying rounds where we competed to win points and move up in the ranks. As a very new team (having only started 3 months prior) we had to think on our feet and learn on the job. However, after forming an alliance with Simon Langton boys school, we had a very close semi final round that we managed to win, thanks to a combination of both teams’ skills. After a not-so-glorious defeat in the finals, we finished third. Due to the fact that both winning teams had qualified for nationals already (one of the teams had gone to worlds in Kentucky), we made it to the national competition in Birmingham which we will be attending in March. Well done team GAVIN! We learnt some valuable lessons at the competition- especially not to lose the small parts that are vital to our robot’s function. All of our rounds can be found on qegs robotics YouTube channel- we definitely recommend having a look. Thank you very much to all of our team members- Jonty for his amazing driving skills, Alfie, Toby, Benedict and Alex for their work in engineering the robot and working on the technological side of things. And me, Lara, who was in charge of stuff like this, plus keeping the team together and on-task. Also thank you very much to Mr Perks our awesome teacher for giving up so much of his time to help us.